Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
Society, whose membership had reached a low of four hundred, held a rally in St Pancras Fields.13
The Home Office’s intelligence-gathering network had become more efficient by this time, and Wickham could claim that it possessed ‘without bustle, noise or anything that can attract the Public attention … the most powerful means of observation and information, as far as their objects go, that ever was placed in the Hands of a Free Government’ – which leads one to wonder about the government’s motives for the crackdown that followed these provocative but hardly menacing activites.14
It implemented what one of the Corresponding Society’s members, Francis Place, a London leather-breeches maker who had fallen foul of the authorities following a strike in 1793, called a ‘Reign of Terror’, arresting all those who had spoken at the St Pancras Fields meeting and hounding its critics. ‘A disloyal word was enough to bring down punishment upon any man’s head,’ according to Place; ‘laughing at the awkwardness of a volunteer corps was criminal, people were apprehended and sent on board a man of war for this breach of decorum, which was punished as a terrible crime’. A man in Gosport was sent to prison for having damned Pitt and the ministry. A bookbinder was given five years with hard labour for shouting ‘No George, no war!’ Innocuous debating clubs were investigated and their members placed under surveillance. The net of suspicion was cast wide. In August, the Home Office investigated reports of a French advance party which had holed up in a house at Nether Stowey near Bridgwater in Somerset, and who were walking around the countryside with portfolios under their arms, making plans of the area, often going out at night. An agent despatched from London ascertained that they were not French, but confirmed that the tenant of the house, a Mr Wordsworth, and his friends, who included a Mr Coleridge, were disaffected, dangerous, and needed to be watched.15
Heterodox views were punished in extra-judicial ways, with writers and journalists being harassed, beaten and detained for long periods. They were gagged in various ways, by having their works seized and destroyed, their plays shouted off the stage by organised claques, or their writings damned with slanderous accusations of immorality or sexual deviancy by a host of government-funded hacks given generous amounts of space in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin and the True Briton. Writers such as Amelia Alderson Opie and Mary Wollstonecraft were represented as unnatural, and therefore immoral. Their arguments were dismissed as ‘weak’ and ‘womanish’, they were criticised for being intellectually out of their depth, labelled as promiscuous, shameless and immodest, the implication being that their literary urge was no more than a manifestation of their lust. Wollstonecraft’s husband William Godwin was ridiculed as a henpecked joke, the author of ‘obscene’ and ‘nauseous’ publications. Thomas De Quincey recalled that he was regarded ‘with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampire’.16
The government introduced further repressive measures, including effective censorship through the registration of printing presses and forbidding the printing of material originating abroad. It banned all associations and trade unions, outlawing the London Corresponding Society, whose leaders were already either in Newgate or in Coldbath Fields house of correction – the ‘English Bastille’ to the Whigs. The Unlawful Societies Act had originally been phrased so as to ban all societies which demanded an oath of their members, but the Freemasons, for whom the oath was crucial, intervened. On 30 April 1799 the Earl of Moira, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England, and the Duke of Atholl, his Scottish counterpart, went to Downing Street and persuaded Pitt to insert a clause which would permit them to keep their secret oaths.17
In the House, Lord Holland denounced the government’s use of the war and the threat of revolution in order to browbeat the people into submission, and challenged it ‘to produce substantial documents, rather than the suggestions of ministers, or the vague suspicions of individuals’ to justify its repressive measures. He accused it of employing ‘a system of government by alarm’, obtaining extensions to its power year after year ‘on the score of allegations, which subsequent events have disproved’.18
In his Letters on a Regicide Peace, written in 1796 and arguing the case for a war to the death with revolutionary France, Burke claimed that the war was not over a particular issue, but was a war on ‘evil’, and assured his readers that it was a life-and-death struggle, as the system of government adopted by France ‘must be destroyed, or it will destroy all Europe’. According to him, the French ‘system of manners’ was ‘at war with all orderly and moral society’, and he invoked the ‘Law of Neighbourhood’, the law of civil vicinity which gives a householder the right to protest at a nuisance put up by a neighbour, likening the state of revolution in France to someone opening up an ‘infamous brothel’ next door. ‘What in civil society is a ground of action, in politick society is a ground of war,’ he argued.19
Burke calculated that there were some 400,000 active ‘political citizens’ in England. ‘I look upon one fifth, or about eighty thousand, to be pure Jacobins; utterly incapable of amendment,’ he wrote. ‘On these, no reason, no argument, no example, no venerable authority, can have the slightest influence.’ They represented a ‘great and formidable’ force, quite adequate to overthrow the government. He lamented that ‘our constitution is not made for this kind of warfare’. ‘It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence,’ he wrote, revealing a surprising lack of faith in democracy’s ability to defend itself by standing by its own values.20
He voiced the fear that if peace were signed, young Englishmen would travel to France, ‘to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place’ and ‘to be corrupted by every means of cabal and corruption’, and, having imbibed the pollution of atheism and Jacobinism, would return to gradually corrupt all aspects of English life by contagion, beginning with Parliament, followed by the courts, where criminals would end up becoming judges, then the press, then the army, and so on until the whole fabric of the nation was rotten.21
Burke’s fears seem curiously overstated, given that the overwhelming majority of even the most radical advocates of reform were firm believers in the fundamental merits of the English constitution. There undoubtedly were revolutionaries conspiring underground, but the very fact that we know little or nothing of them is eloquent testimony to their significance. And for all the agitation by the Corresponding and other societies, the lower orders were politically indifferent. A recent study of nearly five hundred documented riots and disturbances between 1790 and 1810 reveals that 39 per cent concerned food, 7.2 per cent labour conditions, 21.6 per cent recruiting methods, and only 10 per cent had any political or ideological basis. It is true that the percentage of politically motivated disturbances was higher in London. It is also true that as the participants were driven by a variety of often hazy grievances, any crowd could be manipulated into a revolutionary frenzy. But none were. As for the supposed threat of contagion, there is overwhelming evidence that even at moments of war-weariness and discontent, hatred and contempt for France and all things French persisted in every class of society.22
To be fair to Burke and those who shared his fears, it is worth remembering that similar alarms agitated the United States, which one might have thought more immune, if only on account of its geographical position. While Jefferson and the Republicans made light of the excesses of the Revolution in France, the Federalists were horrified to see America’s sister-republic and erstwhile ally descend into lawlessness. On the one hand, Louis XVI was guillotined in effigy and democratic societies were formed to protect the United States from counter-revolution. On the other, the September massacres in Paris were represented as a vision from hell, and some warned that if Jacobin ideas took hold in America bloody violence would sweep away the political and social edifice. Anti-Jacobin texts proliferated, feeding the fear that one of the many heads of the revolutionary hydra might appear on